Moving to Besthesda for a new job, please recommend elementary schools. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

OP - Good advice from last poster on the idea to come to the area and visit the schools you are interested in. It is hard to balance out academic and social/communication needs. I think you probably realize that kindergarten in many ways now is no longer a time for "play," but really like first grade was for young adults when they were in school. So even if there is a floating classroom assistant, the focus is so much now on academics and providing support to kids that way - staying on task, doing specific work rather than how Suzie plays with Alice at whatever play center.

I think it would also be good to try to connect with parents of other young children with Autism in the area you are looking at if there are Autism specific boards or groups you culd find out about. Another thought where speech therapy is so important for DD, you might try to get opinions of private speech therapists in the area as to which schools would provide the most ST services and social skills modeling.

For DD, if lunch is in a cafeteria, then I would request a "lunch buddy table" accommodation or somehow out at recess "a play partner" (rotating weekly) or however it might be done. You might ask if DD started out in a more self-contained environment with mainstreaming, if this approach can transition into fuller maintreaming/inclusion. Again, it is sometimes hard to learn what the experience of a student really is from what you are being told what you want to hear.

A final thought is that I am seeing from a granddaughter with no special needs - other than she is finding "the pace" of instruction in first grade fast with little extra support available within even a classroom of 16 student and is struggling. A report card of all "P's" does very little to give a parent an indication of where skills are lacking etc. In some areas of Montgomery County there is also a high number of ESL students which often means a different kind of intervention and support and a principal and staff may well be trying to balance out those needs, too. Perhaps where you are looking this is not so prevalent an issue. Again the best you can do is to go observe the school setting to see physically what a regular K class looks like, where are smaller classrooms located in relationship to regular K classes, how are therapies delivered push in or pull out and consider what might meet your daughter's needs best.

[Anonymous]

The Autism class doesn't seem to me what OP is looking for. She is looking for mainstream. The MCPS offerings for autism classes are self-contained for kids with more significant needs.

If OP's child is HFA/Aspergers -- there is really nothing in K. Starting in first, if you fight like hell and suffer enough, you might get considered for placement in the county's Aspergers program. But you'd better hire the consultant to even get a shot at it. There are only 2 locations in elementary offering the Aspergers program.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the aides that are in Bethesda ES. Are these school staff? Are they full-time aides in the class for the entire class? Or just assigned to specific kids and they pitch in where they can?

Op -- most mainstream are 1 adult. No budget in MCPS for 2 FT adults in a classroom. No way. Only in the Learning Centers, for kids with significant need, are there 2 adults.

There is sometimes a special ed/resource teacher who rotates in to work with specific children. This person also helps out with the other kids as possible. But, this person, as I discovered to my dismay, typically has at least 4 classrooms to rotate through during the day.

My homeschool in Silver Spring only has 1 resource teacher for the entire K-5. Needless to say, we don't attend there! I could cry!

[Anonymous]

OP, if your child is 5 then she would be on the young side for K in the fall. Would you consider holding her back a year and doing PEP the preschool program instead? It would probably only be for the morning or afternoon, but I've been told that once you're in PEP you can get more supports for K. The only people I know who got IEPs in K without a big huge fight went through PEP first and their IEPs were basically written by PEP staff and the schools just accepted them.

[Anonymous]

I do not have personal experience, but I've heard that the support for kids with autism at Rosemary Hills Primary School (K-2) is very good.

[Anonymous]

Same as PP, based on a very limited sample of three sets of parents I know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Autism class doesn't seem to me what OP is looking for. She is looking for mainstream. The MCPS offerings for autism classes are self-contained for kids with more significant needs.

If OP's child is HFA/Aspergers -- there is really nothing in K. Starting in first, if you fight like hell and suffer enough, you might get considered for placement in the county's Aspergers program. But you'd better hire the consultant to even get a shot at it. There are only 2 locations in elementary offering the Aspergers program.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the aides that are in Bethesda ES. Are these school staff? Are they full-time aides in the class for the entire class? Or just assigned to specific kids and they pitch in where they can?

Op -- most mainstream are 1 adult. No budget in MCPS for 2 FT adults in a classroom. No way. Only in the Learning Centers, for kids with significant need, are there 2 adults.

There is sometimes a special ed/resource teacher who rotates in to work with specific children. This person also helps out with the other kids as possible. But, this person, as I discovered to my dismay, typically has at least 4 classrooms to rotate through during the day.

My homeschool in Silver Spring only has 1 resource teacher for the entire K-5. Needless to say, we don't attend there! I could cry!

Thanks! I don't even know if she is high functioning or low. She is verbal but is delayed. But I am looking into the two Aspergers programs as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, if your child is 5 then she would be on the young side for K in the fall. Would you consider holding her back a year and doing PEP the preschool program instead? It would probably only be for the morning or afternoon, but I've been told that once you're in PEP you can get more supports for K. The only people I know who got IEPs in K without a big huge fight went through PEP first and their IEPs were basically written by PEP staff and the schools just accepted them.

Thanks for all the replies again! I really appreciate it.

I can not hold her back. She has an late birthday so she is already old compared to her classmates. Also she is very tall and looks like 6 or 7.

[Anonymous]

OP, She's mainstreamed now so I would be surprised if she is not considered high functioning. Does she know her letters, letter sounds and her numbers? Can she read? Can she express her likes and dislikes? Do they do any academics at your preschool? Is she at the top, middle or bottom of the class in terms of that kind of development?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, She's mainstreamed now so I would be surprised if she is not considered high functioning. Does she know her letters, letter sounds and her numbers? Can she read? Can she express her likes and dislikes? Do they do any academics at your preschool? Is she at the top, middle or bottom of the class in terms of that kind of development?

She knows letters and letter sounds, numbers. She can not read. She can express her likes but not dislikes. When she color, she could not keep the color inside the lines. If she has a scar, she could not tell exactly what happened to her. He attention span is about 15~20 min, then after that she will probably play with her belly or her toes and laugh really loud by herself without adult interfereance.

[Anonymous]

Hmmm. Definitely get an advocate. It sounds like you can show educational impact. You have a current IEP, which is great! Do you have recent test results to share, etc? I'm sure a consultant will steer you in the right direction on all you will need to bring to the table.

Like the PP from earlier said, K is pretty demanding. The kids have to sit and attend to instruction for a good amount of the day. Lunch is about 20-30 minutes and then recess for 30 minutes. For my HFA kid, the lunch/recess block was very stressful on top of the academic focus/attention issues. The biggest struggle I had (and I'm the poster who pulled kid out of MCPS), was to get them to understand how stressed my child was at lunch and recess with no support.

My child would wander around alone and crying at recess (bad days). Good days he would try to play with others but not quite the right way and ended up playing alone. And I know this because I volunteered there and saw it happening. I was devastated and even more so bc they refused to provide lunch and recess support! And the school is only required to have 2 aides per 60 kids on the playground!

And, if your child becomes so dis-regulated that she will laugh and roll around in class, she will have a tough time of K. Some teachers can be very punitive and take away their free-play time at the end of the day so the child makes up the work they were too dis-regulated to do during instruction time. Yes, this happened to us too. :/

I have been where you are. This transition from pre-k to K is really rough for special needs kids (and all kids, really).

Hugs to you.

[Anonymous]

Your daughter sounds a LOT like my son. Best way to describe my son is moderate autism. His responses to questions sound very similar to your child. I attended the Kindergarten meeting for him yesterday.

MCPS explained to me that placement depends many factors but mainly the # of hours of services the child needs per week and then what schools in the cluster that serve that many hours.

It was recommended that my son attend the learning center at Burning Tree. I visited the school and didn't feel that the class was a good fit for him. I am sure it is a great class/school and wonderful class setting for some kids but just didn't seem like the right for my little guy. The other school recommended to us was Kensington Parkwood in the LAD program. They explained to me that this is like a typical class with all services pushed in (I was told typical class is about 25 students. The teacher for that program is the one who told me 25 students.). I also did not feel like this was the appropriate setting for my son. He would drowned in a class of 25 but he also did not need as much support as the learning center...

To me, it seems like the kids in the middle of the autism spectrum have a much harder time finding a school that fits. MCPS has great services for high functioning (little support needed) or more severe autism.

We decided to waive kindergarten and have him do transitional K and then K the following year. He is in private school now, very small mainstream class and we provide fulltime shadow trained by his ABA therapist in addition to ABA therapy and OT outside of school. The school only goes through K though so we will have to start the hunt again soon.

I don't really have a ton of advice for you because I am not sure how you would handle MCPS if you haven't moved here yet and don't have a specific home school. I definitely think you need an advocate to help navigate.

Wishing you lots of luck in this process. It can be very overwhelming.

[Anonymous]

Last PP's post was very thoughtful but I would argue MCPS does not have great services for high functioning kids. These kids need social support and services for pragmatic speech but usually they get zilch. We had trouble getting a 504 plan. They gave us the no educational impact BS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Last PP's post was very thoughtful but I would argue MCPS does not have great services for high functioning kids. These kids need social support and services for pragmatic speech but usually they get zilch. We had trouble getting a 504 plan. They gave us the no educational impact BS.

This is the PP you mentioned. Thank you for the info on the lack of social support and speech. It is good to know that the services still are not good for high functioning (not good that services stink but at least good to know)... as I mentioned, my son is in the middle but still very young and we had been told by a few people that as he gets older AND IF he becomes higher functioning that we would likely be happy in MCPS. We have pretty much accepted that we will be dealing with private school forever.

I am so sorry you and your child have to deal with the battle for services.

[Anonymous]

12:01 makes a great point about teachers' being punitive for things that are just part of having ASD like stims.

Our mainstream preschool was very understanding about this and DS never had any issues. In MCPS K there was a color chart for behavior that was posted on the wall. All the other kids got the "good" colors like Blue and Green while DC was constantly on the "bad" Orange and Red for things like getting up, making noises, spinning when he was supposed to be sitting.

DS began to hate school and hate himself. I was shocked that a 6-year-old could become clinically depressed but that's what our doctor told us was happening.